NEW YORK — After lying undisturbed in a New Jersey warehouse for nearly 30 years, documents revealing the desperate efforts of Anne Frank's family to escape to the United States and Cuba from Nazi-occupied Holland in 1941 have been discovered thanks to a clerical error.

The previously unknown story told in the 81 pages of government papers and personal correspondence that were made public Wednesday begins on April 30, 1941, days after a Gestapo courier tried to blackmail the Franks, and ends a few months before July of 1942, when they and another family went into hiding for two years, as vividly chronicled by Anne in her famous diary.

"I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to," Anne's father, Otto, wrote to his college friend, Nathan Straus Jr., the head of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's and the son of a Macy's co-owner, asking him to put up a $5,000 bond. "It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance," Otto Frank wrote.

Page by page, the papers illustrate the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States in those days. Even with powerful connections and money, European Jews could not overcome the State Department's restrictions against refugees, said two Holocaust scholars who examined the documents.

"The story of Anne Frank served as an icon, a way into the much broader story of the Holocaust," said David Engel, a professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University. "That process is repeating itself with this file. This is a way for all of us to understand a much broader story" — of how thousands of refugees were turned away because of fears they might be spies or saboteurs.

The file, originally in the hands of the National Refugee Service, was turned over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York in 1974 along with tens of thousands of other files from private Jewish refugee agencies.

It was not until 2005 that YIVO got a grant to organize and index the 350 file cabinets of material it had stored in an off-site facility. In the summer of that year, Estelle Guzick, a part-time volunteer, was sorting through papers when she saw a file jacket was missing the owner's date of birth, said Carl Rheins, YIVO's executive director. He said she opened it and saw that the children's names were Anne and Margot Frank.

YIVO kept the find under wraps until Wednesday to straighten out the complicated legal questions of confidentiality and copyright, Rheins said. The Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, controls most of the Franks' estate.

The papers are now available to scholars at YIVO's library on West 16th Street.

If there is one face that evokes the immeasurable loss from the Holocaust, it is Anne Frank's. Her daily account of hiding in an Amsterdam building before her imprisonment and death in Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945, at 15, has become a worldwide literary and historical landmark. Given the extraordinary efforts to preserve Anne's legacy by her father, the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps, the discovery of the neglected file is particularly surprising.

The documents show how Otto Frank, his brothers-in-law, his friends and refugee agencies tried to navigate the bewildering maze of regulations that included gathering sponsors, large sums of money and proof of how their entry would benefit America. Even the assistant secretary of state at the time, Adolf Berle, despaired of the confusion. He wrote in a letter in January 1941 that some consulates ask "for a trust fund. Others ask for affidavits. One particularly shocking case stated that nothing would be accepted save from a relative in the United States under a legal obligation to support the applicant.

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"It does seem to me that this department could pull itself together sufficiently to get out a general instruction which would be complete enough and simple enough so that the procedure could be standardized."

Richard Breitman, a historian at American University, explained that after France fell to the Germans in the summer of 1940, fears grew in America that a fifth column of spies and saboteurs would be dispatched from Europe. As a State Department. memorandum dated May 2, 1941, declared: "At a time like this, when the safety of the country is imperiled, it seems fully justifiable to resolve any possible doubts in favor of the country, rather than in favor of the aliens concerned."

By June 1941, no one with close relatives still in Germany was allowed into the United States because of suspicions that the Nazis could use them to blackmail refugees into clandestine cooperation. That development ended the possibility of getting the Frank girls out through a children's rescue agency.

Soon after, Germany closed American consulates throughout its territories. As the exchange of letters show, Otto Frank would have had to get an exit permit out of the Netherlands, and transit visas for a series of Nazi-occupied countries to one of the four neutral areas where America still had consular offices.

By the end of the summer, they realized it was hopeless. "I am afraid, however, the news is not good news," Straus wrote to Otto Frank on July 1, 1941.

Frank then tried to get to Cuba, a risky, expensive and often corrupt process. "The only way to get to a neutral country are visas or others States such as Cuba," he said in a letter to Straus on Sept. 8. On Oct. 12, 1941, he wrote, "It is all much more difficult as one can imagine and is getting more complicated every day."

Because of the uncertainty, Otto Frank decided to try for a single visa for himself. It was granted and forwarded to him on Dec. 1. No one knows if it arrived. Ten days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and Havana canceled the visa.

The last few papers in the file date from June 1945 to 1946. They include letters from Otto's brother-in-law, Julius Hollander, who was trying to locate the Franks and arrange for them to emigrate to the United States. There is a brief notification that Hollander's sister, Edith Frank, died and her daughters, Margot and Anne, are missing. What follows is a letter from Hollander saying that Otto Frank was staying in Amsterdam and no longer wanted to come to the United States.